The Boring Habits That Built Evo Communications

I picked up the book Atomic Habits because of my daughter. She's 20 and at a holiday gift exchange with friends this year, everyone brought their three favorite things from the year. Her three? Three copies of Atomic Habits. When your kid recommends a book three times over at a party, you read the book.

James Clear has a line in it that I keep coming back to: you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. I read that sentence and felt a little called out because for nine years, I've told people that Evo Communications was built on hard work and a strong goal to create something of my own. Although that's true, it's not the whole story.

Clear's broader thesis in the book is that tiny, consistent actions compound into remarkable results and the way you make those actions stick is by building easy-to-repeat systems. Goals still matter; he's not arguing otherwise and neither am I. But goals don't separate the people who build something from the people who don't. Most people who leave the corporate world to go out on their own have roughly the same goal: build a sustainable business. Most goals in any given field look identical. It’s what people do to reach those goals that is the difference. 

Systems keep me on track

One of the questions I get most often from corporate communications pros who leave their job to start a solo career is, "How did you do it? How did you build your company?"

My honest answer used to be simple: "I got up every morning, sat down at my desk and just started getting after it." And while it’s true, it’s the only answer I had because I didn’t actually have the language for what I'd been doing. Reading Clear's book was the first time I realized I had a framework for nearly a decade of "stuff" I’d been doing.  I started recognizing my own habits in his words and thinking, huh, I'm actually doing this right, I just never knew how to explain it.

That's part of why, when I meet a freshly launched consultant who asks whether I had a business plan when I started, my honest answer is: “I wrote it the week before I launched Evo Communications and everything since then has been small tweaks based on what I'm learning day to day.” Not exactly the answer they're expecting, but it's the truth. So, here's the more specific version of what some of those tweaks have looked like.

Coming out of the corporate world, I had structure built into every day, things like meetings, deadlines, teams, processes I didn't have to invent myself. That all went away the moment I left that environment. And though the new-found freedom was real, so was the discomfort of knowing that whether anything got done was entirely up to me. I launched Evo Communications to solve a problem I used to have in my corporate role—that was the goal. But I built Evo Communications by showing up consistently, creating processes, keeping what worked, ditching what didn't and adjusting in small increments along the way. 

Some of my systems are very simple

The first system I created was a morning routine. I set a time I needed to be at my desk, working, and I stuck to it—no sudden urgency around laundry, dinner or some other household task that only became interesting the moment I was supposed to be working. Over time, that consistent starting point got me into my mental work zone faster. Nine years in, getting into that zone isn't the hard part anymore; it’s getting out of it at the end of the day that is.

Calendar blocking came next. I block time for what I need to get done and estimate how long it'll take, which matters most on the days I'm enjoying the work enough to lose track of time entirely. It keeps me honest about how I'm spending my hours, not just how I hope I'm spending them.

And then there's walking, every day, regardless of season or mood. In warmer months, I get outside and walk around the block once or twice a day, even when I'm sure I don't have time. When the weather's bad or I'm in what I call "weight loss mode," I use a walking pad at my desk for at least an hour. The movement clears my head and more times than I can count, I've solved a problem or found an idea mid-walk that I couldn't find sitting still.

None of these are complicated systems. They're small habits, repeated enough times, that quietly became how I work.

Systems evolve—and so do you

Not every system is easy to build or built right the first time. But Clear's point holds: small, sustainable changes, made one at a time, become habits and habits become change you can actually see. When I repeat something enough, I start to notice where it's inefficient and I fix it. Sometimes that's as small as building a template so I'm not starting from scratch every time. That leaves me with one less decision to make and one more bit of brainpower freed up for something that actually moves the business forward.

That's how I've kept Evo Communications running and growing and helping people every day: not one big reinvention but a lot of small, repeated corrections.

So which one matters more?

Clear would say systems matter more than goals and I agree with him. Not because goals don't matter—they tell you what direction to walk in—but because the goal was never the differentiator. The system is. Two people can want the exact same thing but the one who builds a repeatable way to work toward it is the one who's still standing and thriving many years later. 

I realize I didn't just get up and get after it. I showed up whether I felt like it or not (and continue to do so today). That's not a goal. That's a system. And it's the one I'd tell any new solo consultant to build first.